


when you're a companion

by collapsedstars



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Doctor Who Feels, Gen, Original Character(s)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 04:07:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1089431
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/collapsedstars/pseuds/collapsedstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Inspired by a post on Tumblr about a potential companion for the Doctor. </p>
<p>"I want the Doctor to take a kid as his companion.<br/>A 14-15 year old kid who’s parents are fighting, has few friends, bad grades, and feels like complete shit before the Doctor comes.<br/>No kissing, complicated relationships, confusion or stuff like that, just the Doctor taking a kid who doesn’t see much out of life for a ride."</p>
<p>An episodic drabble about their misadventures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when you're a companion

**Author's Note:**

> I'm never a fan of original characters, who can always veer dangerously towards the "self-insertion" category. But I liked the premise, and I liked the idea that I came up. Well, we'll see how it goes.
> 
> The Doctor is the Eleventh Doctor, for no other reason than that I really like the Eleventh Doctor and want to see his interactions with this character. 
> 
> Thanks for reading!

The Doctor comes while I’m in school.

I don’t know what he is at first. I just think he’s some nut the school hired because Mrs. Peterson had a nervous breakdown last week, and our budget’s been cut so that we don’t have enough money to hire an actual professional teacher.

He comes in saying some kind of nonsense about advanced quantum physics, and Stevens, the kid who always sits in the front row with hair covering the entire front of his face, quietly informs him that the curriculum isn’t on physics, it’s about English literature, actually. The Renaissance period, Shakespeare.

The man just looks at him for a moment, and there’s a smooth upward motion with (non existent) eyebrows. The entire class is gaping by then, because we’ve never seen a teacher so incompetent. At least most of the people at this school know what they’re here to do. “

Wrong class. Hm. Sorry.”

And then he leaves.

And so we’re stuck for another fifteen minutes, waiting for someone to come and tell us what to do. Most of the kids do some homework; others sit with anxious faces, looking at the clock and at the door, whispering about fetching another teacher since it’s against the rules to sit in a classroom unsupervised.

I sit with my hands folded, and every tick of the clock grates against my temples. It strikes me as ridiculous that a student expects more professionalism from a teacher than the faculty themselves.

The thought nags at my head, until I realize I’m standing and heading for the door. The class watches as I storm out, my boots making harsh squeals against linoleum floor.

* * *

The hallway is long and the classroom windows are narrow, but it’s not too long until I spot the man waving his hands around like a maniac in front of a group of students who are much more rowdier than his first one. There’s a couple touching each other in the back, a guy who’s obviously high giggling to himself on the floor, and just a group of teenagers being...teenagers.

He hasn’t noticed. Or, more likely, he doesn’t care.

I have a strange urge to punch him.

Instead, I knock on the open door.

He stops talking, and looks towards me curiously. There’s a flicker on his face, and it strikes me as weird, but I don’t care. He’s probably a pervert who signed up to be a substitute just so he could get a class like this, where a teenage couple can have sex with their clothes on without the teacher “noticing”.

“Can I help you?”

I put on my best polite face and step slightly into the classroom, a foot half into the threshold.

“Yes, sir. You left my class unattended, and we weren’t sure whether another substitute was coming or not.”

He looks surprised, and then he glances at the students. There’s one mousy brown haired boy who catches his eye, and then that student looks at me.

My breath catches.

I don’t understand what I’m seeing.

He has four mouths, slit across like someone had taken a razor and held him down to cut open his face. His eyelids are twisted shut, like someone had just yanked down the fabric of a curtain.

And then he grins.

I jerk back, nearly falling over my boots. There’s a surprised shout in the air, and I realize, I’m the one who’s shouting. The man rushes over to me, his hand surprisingly steady. He smells like the sun, I dimly think. I didn’t know that the sun smelled like this.

The class is curiously still. Normally, I’d be hearing some kind of jeering inside, or whispers of concern, curiosity, or annoyance, but no. There’s nothing.

I look up.

The ceiling is gray. It’s always been gray, but it’s different. It doesn’t have water stains or remains of spitballs and gum studded in the corners. It’s just...gray. Muted. Like the entirety of the ceiling’s existence has disappeared.

And then I see him.

The boy with his four mouths that waggle black tongues at me.

He’s surrounded by gray walls.

I am surrounded by gray walls.

Everywhere around me is silent; I can hear nothing. The floor is no longer dirty linoleum. It’s just solid gray matter.

I don’t understand. I don’t understand. Jesus fucking Christ, I don’t understand--

A hand grasps mine, and I gasp. My vision blurs, and I can see the classroom again, with all of its dreary English preparatory school glory. The gray room and the school merge and divide, and I’m being split into two places at once. T

he hand is the only thing I can feel. I grasp it, willing myself not to go insane.

The boy is still there, looking at me with his mouths open, black tongues peeking between shocking pink gums.

He’s toying with me. I can tell that much.

As the rooms shift between each other faster and faster, I squeeze my eyes shut and struggle to listen. In one ear, there’s shouting and yelling and sneakers squealing around me; in the other, there’s silence.

Then I feel lips in my ear.

Someone’s whispering. “You’re doing excellent; just hold on a bit longer. He’s the kind to develop attachments, and he knows you. Open your eyes and look at him. Whatever happens next, don’t worry. I’m here.”

I don’t know why, but I trust the voice. It makes me recall a moment when I’d been holding onto the bars of my bicycle, sure I would fall over and crash to the curb. Yet a voice had told me, “I’m here.”

That day, I was able to fly.

I open my eyes and look straight ahead. I look past the shifting setting, the mouths and the tongues, and I look at him.

His eyes, forced open.

Impossibly blue.

I remember.

James.

James, the boy who played piano.

James, the boy who lived across the street from me for most of my life.

James, the boy who left last summer because his mother died and his father didn’t want to stay in a house full of memories of her.

James, the boy who had my first kiss.

The name drops from my lips, and everything freezes, the gray intermixing with the school in a blur.

I feel the hand drop from my side and all I’m left with is the boy I used to be in love with.

“James.”

I say it again, the name that I thought I’d forgotten.

His mouths close. Four vertical gashes, slit across his face.

He looks at me.

And then, there’s a scream. I hear wind rustling and I can feel something grasping at my legs, as if desperately scrabbling to hold onto this earth, this dimension--

The wind blows, a nice breeze around my skirt. My vision shifts.

James is the last thing I see before I fall to the floor.

* * *

 

The world is back. I’m at the infirmary, judging by the smell, lying down on the most uncomfortable cot ever made. I shift. I hear a disapproving tsk in the corner. The nurse is at her desk.

Boring adults, what would we do without them?

I blink a couple of times before I realize there’s a giant shoe lying next to my cot. Attached to the most spidery pair of legs I’ve ever seen.

The man is there, the nutjob.

“Hello. How are you feeling?”

I remember wanting to punch him in the face, but in that moment, he is the most solid part of my reality. I feel like everything has been shattered into fragments; he’s the only thing that’s remained whole.

And so, I start to cry. I just sit there and sob, and the man holds my hand.

It is, without a doubt, the weirdest experience of my life.

* * *

He later tells me he’s the Doctor.

Long story short, he’s an alien who can travel through time and space with a machine called the TARDIS, built by his superior race.

When I flatly declare it’s a blue box, he scowls.

The bigger inside surprises me, more than I care to admit.

He takes me on a guided tour, and I spend a few hours in the observatory, looking at more stars than any human has ever seen.

It’s while I’m sitting and looking that he quietly informs me James is gone.

The monster with the four mouths took him. It’s an alien from a different dimension, one that the Doctor’s not too sure about. It had come from a leak that had sprung up at our school. A parasite alien, in some sense, that can transform the host to its shape once it’s taken hold of them for long enough. It consumes matter, leaving behind only a solid gray wasteland. The shifting between the school setting and the gray backdrop was an indication of James fighting it.

It took a hold of James three weeks before his mother died.

People had thought it’d been a car accident. Her carcass was the only thing ever found.

Still, James had fought it. He’d convinced his father to move before he could hurt anyone else. Before he could hurt me.

But he was human, and he wanted to see me one last time. He thought he could control it.

I helped, in some way. When James had seen me, he’d realized what was going on. He found the leak and he jumped in, taking the alien with him.

The last thing I’d seen was his empty shell.

I don’t know what to say when the Doctor tells me this, so I don’t say anything.I just look and look at the stars until it feels like I’ll drown in them, in all of their light and ethereal glory.

I can stop thinking if I’m drowning.

* * *

“What’s your name?”

He asks me this after he’s taken me to see Leonardo Da Vinci paint the Mona Lisa. A kind of consolation prize.

I figure it’s taken him long enough.

“Molly. My name is Molly.”

He looks at me and nods, a slight grin on his face.

“Molly. I’ll come find you later.” He sets the gears and takes me home.


End file.
